AN ILLUSTRATED GUIDE
TO
MOBILE TECHNOLOGY
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BISAC Category: TEC061000 TECHNOLOGY & ENGINEERING / Mobile & Wireless Communications
To my wife Aditi, and son Nikhil,
PART I: HISTORY OF THE MOBILE PHONE FROM SMOKE SIGNALS TO WIRELESS RADIO
FROM TRAINS, SHIPS AND TANKS TO THE MOTOR CAR – THE ERA OF ZERO-G FROM THE CAR TO THE STREETS AND INTO THE SHIRT POCKET – THE ERA OF 1G FROM ANALOG TO DIGITAL – 2G AND BEYOND
THE BIRTH OF THE SMART PHONE PART II: MOBILE APPLICATIONS CONSUMER MOBILE APPLICATIONS
THE FIVE STEP OBSTACLE RACE TO SUCCESS BUSINESS AND REVENUE MODELS
PART III: ENTERPRISE MOBILITY MOBILITY IN RETAIL
MOBILITY IN FIELD SERVICE, TRANSPORTATION AND LOGISTICS MOBILITY IN HEALTHCARE
MOBILITY IN INSURANCE, BANKING AND FINANCIAL SERVICES MOBILITY IN HOSPITALITY, TRAVEL AND TOURISM
PART IV: MOBILE TECHNOLOGY MOBILE TELEPHONY CONCEPTS
MOBILE OPERATING SYSTEMS TYPES OF MOBILE APPLICATIONS MOBILE MIDDLEWARE
NON FUNCTIONAL REQUIREMENTS IN MOBILE APPLICATIONS EPILOGUE: FROM UBIQUITY TO INVISIBILITY
TABLE OF FIGURES
BIBLIOGRAPHY AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING IMAGE CREDITS AND COPYRIGHTS
PART I: HISTORY OF THE MOBILE PHONE
On January 9 2007 the world witnessed the first Apple iPhone. This was the day Steve Jobs showcased the iPhone at the Macworld Conference in San Francisco, California in what is considered to be one of the most significant product launches of all times. Later that year – June 29 to be precise – people in the United States got their hands on their first ever iPhone. Within three months Apple had sold its one millionth iPhone in the US. At one point during this sales blitzkrieg, 270,000 iPhones were sold in a 30 hour time span; an average of 150 iPhones getting sold every 60 seconds!
Since its launch in June 2007 Apple has sold more than half a billion iPhones. Seldom has something so expensive that occupies such a small volume sold so many units.
The iPhone, followed by the Google Android Phone that was launched in 2008 have together changed the way we use our phones in such a fundamental manner that we would be excused in believing that these two devices have changed mobile phone history in ways that nothing else has.
However the roots of mobile technology penetrate much deeper into the annals of history.
Over the past six decades, government bodies, international standards bodies, giant corporations and individual innovators have each pushed the envelope on what is
possible in mobile technology. Innovations have come out of university labs, corporate labs, government labs, workshops & conferences, and from people’s homes and garages. This evolution has been a tight interplay between the evolution of mobile networks and the mobile phones that use them. Our mobile phones have evolved to meet our ever growing expectations of them, and the networks have evolved to support what people want to be able to do with their phones.
While the evolution of mobile technology has been complex and multifarious, if you step back a bit from all the complexity, you can spot some pretty remarkable trends and milestones. These milestones have fundamentally shaped the evolutionary history of the mobile phone and the mobile network.
FROM SMOKE SIGNALS TO WIRELESS RADIO
The history of wireless communication goes as far back as we can look into modern human history. For thousands of years people have been inventing ways of communicating over long distances using all kinds of techniques ranging from fireworks to carrier pigeons! The early forms of wireless telegraphic systems actually did use things such as fireworks, and smoke or light signals to transmit information in the form of a string of encoded symbols. All of this off course looks hopelessly primitive compared to what the smart phone sitting in our pockets can do today. But as you will soon see, the DNA of that very phone were manufactured in this early era.
The Photophone
A fascinating invention in the early days of wireless telephony was the Photophone created by Alexander Graham Bell and his assistant Charles Sumner Tainter in February 1880.
Figure 1: Technical Drawing of the Photophone appearing in Alexander Graham Bell and Sumner Tainter’s USA patent 235496 titled “Photo phone-transmitter” published on 14 December 1880.
A beam of light was focused into a parabolic mirror which reflected the light right out. One spoke into the back side of such a mirror. The mirror flexed back and forth ever so slightly in response to the varying pressure of the sound waves hitting it on its back side. This flexing of the mirror’s surface caused the light that was being reflected by the mirror to be proportionately modulated, i.e. its frequency was altered in proportion to the amount and frequency of the flexing of its surface. Thus the light waves that were reflected out from the mirror effectively encoded the speech of the person who was speaking into the backside of the mirror!
The receiver consisted of another parabolic mirror which focused the received light waves into a special material known as transducer which converted light back into sound. Alexander Graham Bell used Lampblack as the trans-ducting material in his original design.
Figure 2: Left: Alexander Graham Bell (1847-1922). Right: Charles Sumner Tainter (1854-1940)
Bell was enormously proud of the Photophone, proclaiming it to be his greatest invention, and also wanting to name his second daughter “Photophone”! Mrs. Bell is said to have wisely discouraged her husband from taking this step.
Bell’s Photophone was subsequently enhanced by himself as well as several other adopters of the device in many important ways. The direct sound-to-light coupling of the original device was changed into a sound-to-electrical-to-light coupling. The range of the Photophone was increased to several miles. The light source was changed from sunlight to a variety of artificial light sources including infrared light. The Photophone was also adopted in battlefields during the 1930s and 1940s for communicating between battlefield field units. A very useful advantage that the Photophone enjoyed in the battlefield was that its light based transmission mechanism could not be easily eavesdropped upon.
their much longer range and the high degrees of reliability they offered under adverse weather conditions proved to be the beginning of the end for the Photophone as a practical wireless communication system.
The Photophone proved to be a lens into the future of communication in a number of ways. For example, the principles of sound-to-electricity-to-light and vice-versa conversion used by the Photophone were astoundingly similar to the fiber-optic based communication systems that came into use almost a century after the Photophone’s invention in 1880.
The advent of radio communication
While Alexander Bell’s Photophone in the 1880s provided a magnificent portal into the future of optical communication, a revolution of an entirely different kind was brewing in Europe and in the United States in the area of radio frequency communications.
Radio waves are the portion of the electromagnetic spectrum between 3 Kilo Hertz and 300 Giga Hertz. The corresponding wavelengths range from 100 Kilometers down to 1 millimeter. Their use as the medium for sending telegraphic messages proved to be a significant up-shift in what was possible in the field of long distance wireless communication.
In fact the genesis of radio as a method of communication goes all the way back to the early 1800s.
From the early 1800s through the 1860s several scientists in Europe, Russia and the USA devised experiments which demonstrated the various ways in which electricity and magnetism were connected to each other. Out of this experimentation was born much of the path breaking work on electromagnetic theory that would go on to form the basis for all forms of modern radio communications including the cell phones that we use today and the wireless networks that they operate over. Some of the early pioneers in the field of electromagnetic theory during the 1800s were Hans Christian Ørsted, André-Marie Ampère, Peter Barlow, Johann Salomo Christoph Schweigger, William Sturgeon, Francesco Zantedeschi, Michael Faraday, Heinrich Lenz and Joseph Henry.
physicist by the name James Clerk Maxwell. In his paper, Maxwell presented a grand unification of several properties of electricity, magnetism and light.
Figure 3: Left: Plaque showing Maxwell’s Equations affixed to the statue of Maxwell in Edinburgh, Scotland. Right: James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879)
Among other things, Maxwell’s theory predicted that electromagnetic waves can travel through space at the speed of light.
This crucial discovery has been the bed-rock of the field of mobile communications ever since.
Figure 4: The Electromagnetic Frequency Spectrum. The Y-axis shows frequency in Kilo Hertz on a logarithmic scale (powers of 10). The colored vertical bars indicate the frequency range for various radio frequency phenomena such as short wave radio, MW Radio, FM Radio, the frequency range that the
zero-G networks (MTS, and IMTS) of the 1940s and 50s used to operate in, the frequency spectrum that modern day cellular phone networks occupy and so on.
(UHF) range.
This would be the world’s first deliberately performed radio-frequency transmission and reception!
Figure 5: Left: Heinrich Rudolf Hertz (1857-1894), Right: Line drawing of the apparatus used by Hertz for transmitting and receiving radio signals through air.
Unfortunately Professor Hertz, in whose honor the unit of frequency, Cycles Per Sec a.k.a. Hertz is named, utterly failed to realize the sheer importance of his achievement. When asked by one of his students what use could be made of his discovery he replied,
“It's of no use whatsoever. This is just an experiment that proves Maestro Maxwell was right—we just have these mysterious electromagnetic waves that we cannot see with the naked eye. But they are there."
When the same student persisted by asking what else could be achieved from this discovery, Hertz replied,
"Nothing, I guess."
Nothing could have been further from the truth.
The birth of radio telephony
As other scientists around the world came to hear about Hertz’s experiments they sought to replicate them and to perform their own experiments in the deliberate transmission and reception of electromagnetic signals.
frequencies.
Figure 6: Graphic from Thomas Edison’s 1891 United States patent application # 465,971 illustrating a means to do radio frequency communication between ships and between ship and shore.
However, in spite of the several patents that were granted in this field, nobody had yet managed to create a commercially viable radio frequency telegraph system.
That task was to lie with a dynamic Italian engineer and inventor named Guglielmo Marconi.
Marconi was able to successfully build upon the work of others before him to create a practically workable and a commercially viable method of radio transmission and reception. Marconi obtained a British patent for his invention in 1897, his first of over 35 patents which he received in the field of radio transmission. The same year the Marconi Company was established. Marconi soon set up the first radio station at Niton, Isle of Wight, England and successfully transmitted a radio message to Bournemouth, England over a distance of 22 Kilometers. Later that year wireless radio telegraph signals were sent over a distance of 34 miles from Salisbury Plain to Bath, England using Marconi’s radio telegraph technology. In the following decade wireless telegraph stations popped up all across the landscapes of Britain and the United States. During the early 1900s the Marconi Company also succeeded in commercializing wireless transmissions across the Atlantic and from ship to shore.
Figure 8: Radio transmission (red arrow) by Marconi in 1898 from his first permanent station on the Isle of Wight, England to Bournemouth, England over a distance of 22 Kilometers.
Newfoundland, Canada
Figure 10: A schematic of spark gap based radio frequency transmitter of the kind used by Marconi to perform telegraphic transmissions.
Figure 11: Photograph of an actual spark gap based radio frequency transmitter used by Marconi to make long distance telegraphic transmissions in the late 1890s and early 1900s.
While radio frequency telegraphy was gaining widespread acceptance by the early 1900s, the transmission of sound over a radio frequency channel wasn’t far behind.
The credit for the first sound transmission over a radio channel is said to lie with the Canadian inventor Reginald Aubrey Fessenden.
Figure 12: Reginald Aubrey Fessenden (1866-1932)
Figure 13: Top: Photo of the rotary gap transmitter used by Fessenden at the Brant Rock transmitting station, Brant Rock, Massachusetts, USA (c1906). Bottom: Photograph of the Brant Rock station in 1912,
taken from Blue Fish Rock. The tall stacks exiting from the building's roof are for the steam engine's boiler.
On December 23 1900 Fessenden successfully made the first long range audio transmission over radio frequencies over a distance of 1 mile from Cobb island in the Potomac River in Maryland, USA.
Fessenden spoke the following words over the radio channel to his associate at the end other:
"One - two - three - four, is it snowing where you are Mr. Thiessen? If it is, would you telegraph back to me?"
His associate replied in the affirmative and the rest is history! The age of radio telephony was born.
frequencies were increased. The methods of transmission and reception underwent significant changes from Fessenden’s original spark transmitter based design. The transmission range went up from dozens of miles to hundreds of miles and the reliability of the equipment improved significantly. Radio telephony began to be used not just for specialized uses such as by the US Weather Bureau to communicate weather data among their weather stations, but also for the public broadcast of signals.
Up through the 1940s radio telephony proliferated in Europe and North America. It was used for Ship – to – Ship and Ship – to – Shore communications, on the battlefields in the form of “portable” trans-receiver sets (or walkie-talkies as they came to be called) and on trains for placing ”pay phone calls” within a certain radial range. Some of the early experiments in train based telephones were carried out in 1918 by the German National Railway, the Deutsche Reichsbahn. By 1926 Deutsche Reichsbahn had installed “pay-phones” in the first class compartments of trains on the Berlin to Hamburg route.
In the early years of the 1900s the use of radio frequency based voice communication proliferated in many parts of Europe and North America. However it hardly resembled what might pass for a modern telephone system. For example, except in a very small highly specialized set of cases, you could not simply place a call by dialing somebody’s telephone number. Besides the radio sets were anything but portable. Each telephone set weighed several dozen Kilograms!
FROM TRAINS, SHIPS AND TANKS TO THE MOTOR CAR – THE
ERA OF ZERO-G
The first large scale rollout of a metropolitan mobile telephone network took place during the mid to late 1940s. Amazingly, the rollout completely skipped the hands and pockets of people and went straight on to get installed in people’s motor vehicles in the form of the Car Phone.
There are a couple of important reasons why the first mobile phone roll out in the United States during the 1940s was also the first car phone rollout of the world. For starters each “mobile” phone unit weighed around 80 pounds (36 Kilograms). It was hardly the kind of device that you could lug around on the street. The mobile phone of the 1940s needed the pulling power of your car’s internal combustion engine to move itself around!
Secondly, the mobile phone system of the 1940s was targeted towards an American population that was becoming increasingly dependent on automobiles as their primary mode of transport rather than trains. What better place to put a phone in than in their car!
This system in the United States was called by the rather uninspiring name “Mobile Telephone Service” or MTS for short.
MTS & IMTS
Figure 14: One of the earliest attempts of using a car mounted phone. Notice the transmitter-receiver unit and the enormous antenna mounted on top of it. This picture was taken circa 1924, four decades before
the rollout of the first commercial car phone network in the United States.
In radio communications, the length of the antenna is inversely proportional to the transmission frequency. You need a long antenna for transmitting or receiving low frequency (long wavelength) signals. The MTS system operated in the Very High Frequency a.k.a. VHF range (30-300 Mega Hertz). In comparison modern cell phone networks operate in the 850 MHz to 2100 MHz Ultra High Frequency a.k.a. UHF range. UHF frequencies are anywhere from 3 to 70 times higher than VHF frequencies. This in turn leads to a short stubby antenna design like the one found on some of the modern cell phones. In fact these days, engineers have found a way to pretty much embed the entire antenna inside the cell phone unit thereby making it completely invisible to the user. On the other hand, since the MTS system of the 1940s used VHF, one needed to mount a ridiculously long antenna on top of your vehicle to get any kind of reception on your car phone in the MTS network. On the plus side the use of VHF meant that MTS required lower power to transmit and it operated over longer distances. Both characteristics were desirable at the time. The whole concept of radio telephony during the better part of the 20th century was based upon the notion of one base station serving a very large
Figure 15: ‘Zero-G’ mobile phone systems such as AT&T’s Mobile Telephone Service were based on the concept of one large tower serving a large geographical area around it.
Bell Labs designed MTS to operate in two modes – a highway mode and an urban mode. The urban mobile car phone network in America went live on June 17, 1946 when a truck driver in St. Louis, Missouri made the first telephone call from his truck. The highway mode went live shortly thereafter in August of the same year.
Figure 16: The illustration shows how the MTS and IMTS car phone equipment that AT&T supplied to its customers during 1940s-70s, was laid out inside the customer’s vehicle.
The MTS equipment was heavy, power hungry and came with very few channels – which meant that only a few people could call at one time within a base station’s network. And it was also very expensive. Still, MTS proved to be dramatically popular within North America. The initial rollout itself covered 60 cities in the USA in its urban mode and 85 cities in its highway mode. The system handled more than 4000 mobile subscribers and 117,000 calls a month. The waiting lists grew longer by the day.
Figure 17: Motorola TLD 1100 MTS Car Phone (1964). Source: National Electronics Museum, Maryland, USA
In 1964, this later feature of direct i.e. non-operator assisted dialing from your car phone was mainstreamed by the next generation of MTS. AT&T once again rather un-imaginatively named the improved version of the Mobile Telephone Service as...the Improved Mobile Telephone Service a.k.a. IMTS.
From 1964 through the early 1980s, IMTS flourished in North America. Full duplex direct dialing from the car phone became a reality for most North American car phone users. During this time, the invention of the electronic solid state transistor also enormously helped the cause of mobile telephony. As a result phone units were further miniaturized and by early 1970s, Motorola was already manufacturing completely solid state versions of phone units.
During the 1960s another car phone based mobile telephone service called the Radio Common Carrier (RCC) was introduced in the United States by companies that competed with AT & T’s MTS and IMTS based car phone systems. RCC continued to operate up until the 1980s.
telephony, and a fashionable thing to be seen lugging around one of these ‘attaché phones’.
Figure 18: The Trigild Gemini 2 briefcase phone
The growth of zero-G systems outside North America
During the 1940s through the 1980s, while the USA and Canada were going all out in their roll outs of car phones, the rest of the world wasn’t far behind.
The A-Netz mobile telephone network that was launched in West Germany in 1958 quickly became one of the world’s largest mobile phone networks of that time. A-Netz was superseded by the B-Netz network in 1972 which among other things offered direct dialing in place of operator assisted dialing.
In 1950s, the USSR began the development of the Altai mobile car phone service. The service was first introduced in Moscow in 1963 and soon spread to major metropolitan areas of the USSR.
Finland launched the ARP car radio phone service in 1971 and by 1978 it had covered 100% of that country. Norway launched its first public mobile telephone network called OLT in 1966.
One of the largest zero-generation analog mobile telephone network rollouts happened in Sweden during the 1950s through the 80s, when the country launched the MTA, MTB and MTD mobile telephone networks. At its peak, MTD had over 20000 mobile phone subscribers and over 700 phone operators switching calls between users.
the decades to come.
Drawbacks of the earlier mobile networks
All of the mobile telephony systems described in this chapter, irrespective of the country that they operated in, were hobbled by several common drawbacks. They operated mostly in the VHF range and rarely in the UHF range. This meant long antennae on mobile units. The long range of VHF signals as compared to UHF used by cellular networks, meant that VHF frequencies could not be reused by base stations in adjacent areas, due to excessive signal interference. Therefore the available VHF spectrum could accommodate only a small number of phone subscribers. Network congestion happened quickly, and often. The mobile telephone equipment weighed several dozen kilograms and literally required a motor vehicle to be carried around. The transmission was done via analog signals and therefore was very easy to be eavesdropped upon. Furthermore, the whole system worked on the concept of central base stations serving geographical areas around them. Therefore coverage was basically on a line-of-sight basis. This meant that if you went behind a tall building, a hill or any other large object you immediately lost the signal. Furthermore, the long wavelength VHF signals don’t get reflected very well back to earth by the earth’s atmosphere. Due to the earth’s curvature, you could lose the signal even on absolutely obstruction-less ground when you travelled “over the horizon” with respect to your base station. These early mobile phone systems could not, and did not, scale well to large geographies. The concept of roaming, although existent at the time, rarely worked seamlessly for the user.
FROM THE CAR TO THE STREETS AND INTO THE SHIRT POCKET
– THE ERA OF 1G
Cellular phone networks are based on the concept of adjacently located coverage areas known as cells. Each cell contains a transmitting tower. As the user moves from one cell to another cell the user’s cell phone collaborates with the transmitting towers of the source and destination cells to “handoff” the user from one cell to the next. The beauty of this handoff procedure lies in its working completely unbeknownst to the user even when a phone call is in progress.
Figure 19: The black hexagons in the graphic represent the geographical cells of a cellular network. Each cell contains a mobile tower at the center of the cell (towers T1, T2, T3, T4 in the illustration). Each tower
transmits into its cell using three different frequencies in three different directions that are 120 degrees apart (shown by the blue double headed arrows). The actual cell in the cellular network is therefore the red colored hexagons in the graphic. Each of these red colored cells is divided into three regions (R1, R2,
R3). Each cell tower services one region within a red cell. When the mobile phone M1 shown in the graphic is switched on, it will scan for signals from all neighboring towers. Since it lies in region R1 it will
in theory find the strongest signal coming from tower T1 and begin communicating with it.
“over-the-horizon” issue faced by the zero-G networks is very elegantly avoided. A cellular network can scale virtually infinitely over and across mountains, around tall buildings, and across rivers and lakes simply by adding more cells to the network. Finally, and very importantly, on a cellular network two subscribers can talk on the same frequency band as long as they are in different cells. This enormously increases the number of simultaneous conversations that the network can support, and thereby addresses the network congestion problem that plagued the hub-and-spoke based zero-G networks.
Birth of cellular telephony concepts
The genesis of cellular telephony began as early as 1940s in Bell Labs, USA. However, cellular networking concepts continued to be researched upon all the way through to late 1970s, i.e. in parallel with the large scale roll outs of zero-G networks that were happening world wide as described in the previous chapter.
On 11 December 1947, Bell Labs researcher Douglas H. Ring together with his colleague W. Rae Young dispatched an internal Bell Labs technical memo that introduced the concept of utilizing adjacently located cellular coverage areas so as to increase the coverage of the mobile telephone service across the nation. While the memo was detailed enough in the description of how the cellular network would function in theory, the technology to actually make it work did not exist at the time. Neither had the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in the United States opened out the frequency channels that such a cellular system would need. Given this situation, the field of cellular telephony would languish for another 20 years. Meanwhile, AT & T continued to petition the FCC for additional frequency allocations. Researchers at Bell Labs and Motorola as well as ones outside the United States would also continue to make progress in cellular telephony research.
1947 memo to Bell Labs was remarkably similar to the structure of modern cellular phone systems. The concept described in D. H. Ring’s memo involved an area that was to be served by a large number of radio
stations using ‘n’ different frequencies. The service radius of each station is fixed. The stations are arranged in such a manner that each station is surrounded by 6 other equidistant stations.
In the 1960s another set of Bell Labs researchers, Richard H. Frenkiel, Joel S. Engel and Philip Thomas Porter built upon the work of Ring and Young and gave it the full technical rigor that would later form the basis for AT & T’s first commercially deployed cellular phone service in America called the Advanced Mobile Phone System (AMPS).
Field trials for AMPS began in 1978 in Chicago, Illinois and Newark, New Jersey. AMPS was launched as the United States’ first cellular mobile telephone service in Chicago, IL in 1983. AMPS was operated by the Ameritech Corporation.
World’s first hand held cell phone
Motorola was a major equipment supplier to AT & T for the MTS and IMTS car phone systems during the 1940s through the 1980s. During this time the company became deeply entrenched in the field of mobile telephony and particularly in the manufacturing of state-of-the-art telephone handsets.
Figure 21: Left: Motorola car phone dialer unit (c1960). Right: Car phone dialer unit mounted under the dashboard of a 1968 Cadillac Fleetwood Brougham.
During the 1960s, while Frenkiel, Engel and others at Bell Labs continued their work on the development of cellular phone networks, Motorola invested in the development of cell phones that would be hand held and truly portable. This feat had started becoming a reality due to factors such as the advent of solid state electronics. The solid state device versions of the mobile phones were lighter and less power hungry than their vacuum tube and mechanical relay based cousins. They also required a smaller, lighter battery. Overall the phone could be made smaller and lighter than the briefcase sized and car trunk size units that were manufactured in the 1940s and 50s.
Martin Cooper who headed Motorola’s communication systems division created the Motorola DynaTAC portable cell phone.
Figure 22: The Motorola DynaTAC8000x cell phone
The original DynaTAC created by Cooper and his team was more than 10 inches long and weighed almost 2 pounds. Most of the weight of the phone came from its battery. It had a talk time of 20 minutes after which it needed to be charged for 10 hours. Cooper has since quipped that the talk time was never an issue since you couldn’t actually hold the phone to your ear for 20 minutes straight due to its sheer weight!
On April 3 1973, Motorola gave a famous street demonstration of the DynaTAC phone when Cooper and his manager John F. Mitchell demonstrated the phone to the media in mid-town Manhattan. Cooper went on to dial Dr. Joel Engel at Bell Labs and spoke the first words on the world’s first truly portable cell phone:
“Joel, this is Marty. I'm calling you from a cell phone, but a real cell phone, a handheld, personal, portable cell phone”.
Unfortunately the size and weight of the DynaTAC quickly earned it the nickname “the brick”.
Over the next 10 years Motorola invested heavily in the development of the “brick phone” and the first commercial version was launched in 1984. It was called as the DynaTAC 8000X and it cost USD 3,995. It was available for use on the AMPS cellular network which was launched in the US just a year earlier.
The growth of cellular telephony outside the United States
The USA rolled out its 1G cellular network in the 1980s, but this time they were beaten to the line by Japan and the Nordic countries.
The world’s first fully automated cellular network was launched not in the USA, but in Japan in 1979 by Nippon Telephone and Telegraph (NTT). It operated over the 400 and 800 MHz ranges. The network was launched initially in metropolitan Tokyo. Within the next five years it spread all across Japan making it one of the first countries of the world with 100% 1G cellular coverage.
Two years later in 1981, the fully automated Nordic Mobile Telephony (NMT) cellular network was launched in Sweden and Norway, followed by a launch in Denmark and Finland in 1982 and Iceland in 1986. Interestingly the first commercial service of NMT was started in Saudi Arabia in 1981 even before the network began operation in Sweden. The initial “user equipment” a.k.a. the phone used on NMT continued to be the heavy car phone based system. However NMT’s specifications were open and therefore encouraged widespread competition among mobile phone manufacturers. This raised the fortunes of companies such as Nokia (called Mobira at that time) and Ericsson in Europe, and further enhanced the global reach of established players such as Motorola. A wonderful feature that NMT came with was the ability to roam freely on it across all the Nordic states that implemented it.
During the 1980s, NMT spread into several Eastern European Countries and Russia. During the same period AMPS spread its wings across North America, and its variants – the TACS (Total Access Communication System), JTACS (Japanese Total Access Communication System) and ETACS (Extended Total Access Communication System) – spread into the United Kingdom, Ireland and Japan.
The 1G analog based cellular networks of the 1980s such as AMPS, NMT, TACS, JTACS and ETACS were a significant improvement over their non-cellular 0G cousins who had prevailed from 1940s to 1970s.
1G mobile phones
The 1980s had begun with the famous introduction in 1984 of the Motorola DynaTAC described earlier. However, there were a few other noteworthy examples of 1G cell phones during the 1980s that have shaped the field of cell phone design and cell phone capability through the 1980s and into early 1990s.
Consider just some of the following phones introduced by Nokia around this time and one gets a feel for how fast mobile phone technology was developing during the 80s.
In 1982 Nokia introduced its first 1G cellular car phone: the Nokia Mobira Senator 450. It operated over the 450 MHz NMT network and weighed a whopping 10 Kilograms.
Figure 23: Nokia Mobira portable cellular phones of the 1980s
1984 through 1989 saw the introduction of the Nokia Mobira Talkman series phones such as the Talkman 320F, 450, and 900. The Talkmans weighed in just under ½ a kg. The Talkman was considered to be quite portable by 1980s standards.
Figure 24: (Left) Nokia Cityman 100 ETACS version announced in January 1990, (Right) Cityman 150 announced in 1989. The Nokia 1100 launched in 2003 is also shown at extreme right for comparison.
The 1987 Cityman 1320 was a direct competitor to the Motorola DynaTAC introduced in 1984. The Cityman 1320 was also Nokia’s first truly hand held phone. Soon after its launch the Cityman 1320 received a huge publicity boost when it was used by Mikhail Gorbachev to make a public phone call from Helsinki, Finland to his communications minister in Moscow. That soon earned the phone the nickname “Gorba”.
Figure 25: Nokia Cityman 1320 (Left) and Motorola DynaTAC 8000X (Right)
at 3/4th of a kilogram and the Cityman 100 weighed in at just under ½ KG.
Two more mobile phones produced during the 1980s deserve a special mention.
The Technophone
In 1984 Nils Mårtensson, a Swedish radio engineer left Ericsson to set up his own company called Technophone. His goal was to create the smallest, lightest and the most user friendly cell phone of the time. The Technophone company sold its phone through another outfit called Excell Communications. With the launch of the Technophone Excell M1 cell phone, Mårtensson succeeded in his goal.
The M1 was by far the world’s smallest and sleekest mobile phone. While its competitors were still struggling to breach the ½ KG mark, the M1’s weight came in well under 350 grams.
And for the first time a cell phone fitted neatly inside your shirt pocket!
Figure 26: Technophone PC107/3
Martensson sold Technophone to Nokia for £34 million.
This single acquisition helped propel Nokia to the world number two slot just behind Motorola.
The Motorola MicroTAC
The second significant mention of the late 1980s cell phone era was the Motorola MicroTAC. Introduced in 1989, the MicroTAC was Motorola’s clearest response yet to the dramatically shrinking cell phone sizes and brought with it an element of sheer style that had been displayed by its competitors’ products.
The Motorola MicroTAC was the world’s first flip top phone.
Figure 27: Motorola MicroTAC 9800x
The extent to which Motorola likely wanted to introduce an element of style into the MicroTAC’s design is evident from the fact that the flip panel of the phone was completely cosmetic. The panel did not carry a microphone at all! What’s more, the external aerial of the phone was also a fake! The phone had an internal aerial but market research at the time apparently pointed to people wanting their phone to sport an external antenna.
The Technophone in 1986 and the Motorola MicroTAC three years later set the high bar for the mobile phone industry in the years to come.
FROM ANALOG TO DIGITAL – 2G AND BEYOND
During the 1980s, the introduction of cellular phone networks had revolutionized mobile telephony in ways that could not have been achieved in the four decades before their introduction. However a common characteristic of the 1-G cellular systems of the 1980s was that they used analog signals to carry the information between the cell phones and the cell phone towers.
Second generation (2G) cellular networks were introduced in the early 1990s. These 2G networks digitized the communication between the cell phone and the tower. This single change from analog to digital yielded enormous benefits. To begin with, digital transmission could be heavily compressed by the phone before transmission. This dramatically reduced the bandwidth requirement for each phone call. Thus each cell of the cellular network could support many more simultaneous conversations than before. Secondly, the digital signal could be very easily encrypted thereby making eavesdropping much harder to do than with the 1G analog signal. Digital transmission also consumed less power, thereby further reducing the size and weight of the batteries that were used by the phones. And with digital, there was also no line noise or ‘hum’ during pauses in the conversation.
Finally, and arguably most significantly, digital transmission made it possible to transmit data over a wireless channel along with voice.
Radio telegraphy began in the 1890s as a way to transmit data symbols over a wireless communication link. Once hundred years later, the introduction 2G networks in the early 1990s, with their ability to transmit data wirelessly, curiously brought the field of radio communications full circle!
In yet another sense, digital telephony technology and the 2G, 3G and 4G networks that it has given rise to have also given birth to a whole new kind of internet – a wireless internet!
The evolution of digital telephony
Several interesting events have shaped the evolution of digital telephony.
The United States, Europe and Japan. Each one took an extraordinarily different route for migrating from 1G to 2G.
The United States made some early successful attempts in the late 1980s to create a digital version of the 1G AMPS cellular system which was already in widespread use in North America around that time. From this resulted two offshoots - the Motorola designed Narrow Band AMPS or N-AMPS and the more widely deployed Digital AMPS or D-AMPS.
D-AMPS which was first launched in the US in 1990, was specifically designed to be backward compatible with the analog AMPS so that you could use a dual mode (analog/digital) cell phone on both versions of the system.
On the other side of the world, Japan migrated its vast analog cellular network operated by Nippon Telephone and Telegraph (NTT) which was deployed through the 1980s, to a digital variant called PDC (Personal Digital Cellular). The 2G PDC cellular network began operation in Japan in 1993.
Meanwhile, Europe took an altogether different route for 2G adoption. By 1990, the European Union had a wide variety of analog cellular networks proliferating throughout its jurisdiction. For example, there were at least half a dozen country specific variants of the NMT cellular network operating within the member states of the EU. The United Kingdom and Ireland on the other hand had the TACS and ETACS cellular networks.
Paradoxically, this fragmentation of 1G cellular networks among the European states was to lead to one of the greatest successful unifications of cellular networking standards that the world has ever witnessed.
The birth of the GSM standard
As early as 1981, European member states recognized the need for network standardization and consolidation into a single unified digital cellular network. In 1987, thirteen European Union countries signed an MoU in Copenhagen mandating a single digital cellular communication standard to be implemented across the EU. This was to be the genesis of what would go on to be published as the Global System for Mobile communications a.k.a. the GSM standard in 1990.
built by Telenokia and Siemens and operated by Radiolinja. The world’s first GSM call was made over this network on July 1 1991 by the former Finnish prime minister Harri Holkeri from Helsinki, Finland to the deputy mayor of the city of Tampere. The following year the world’s first SMS was sent over the GSM network.
On 10 November 1992, the Nokia 1011 (a.k.a. the Nokia Mobira Cityman 2000) was launched. The 1011 quickly went on to become the world’s first mass produced and commercially successfully GSM phone. The Nokia 1011’s shell had the iconic “candy bar” shape – a design that was to be adopted extensively by cell phones in the decades to come. Incidentally the product number 1011 also marks the date that Nokia launched the phone – November 10.
Figure 28: Nokia 1011
GSM quickly established itself as the 2G cellular network of choice across Europe. GSM continued to be adopted worldwide at an astounding rate. Today it is estimated that more than 80% of the mobile phone carrying population of the planet communicates over the 2nd generation (2G) GSM network or an evolved version thereof.
Figure 29: The above graphic illustrates the explosive growth in data transfer speeds supported by various wireless protocols. The X-axis represents time. The circles represent various data transfer protocols. The area of each circle is proportional to the theoretical download speed supported by that protocol. As you can see some circles are too big to fit inside the graphic. For such circles, the fraction of
the circle that is visible in the graphic will give you an idea about the size of the overall circle and therefore the data transfer speed supported by the corresponding protocol. The color of each circle represents the protocol generation viz, 2G, 3G etc. The data speeds of the Bell 101 modem of 1958 and the
Hayes Smartmodem introduced in 1981 are also shown so as to provide a sense of perspective about the phenomenal growth in the data transfer speeds achieved over the past few decades.
Data could be transmitted wirelessly even in the analog 1 G wireless phone networks. However one had to “acoustically couple” i.e. literally physically strap a modem to one’s mobile phone so that the acoustic signal generated by the modem could be sent over the wireless network via the phone’s speaker, and the return signal could be “heard” by the modem via the phone’s receiver. In a way this was no different than acoustically coupling a modem to a standard landline phone. Slightly advanced versions of this technique relied on building the modem into the mobile phone unit so that one did not have to physically strap the modem on to the phone. But the principle remained the same. Overall it was a very primitive way of transmitting data and one could get speeds of no more than 2400 bits/second i.e. basically the same as that of the 1984 vintage V.26bis modem.
using CSD over a dedicated wireless data channel between the phone and the base station. With the introduction of CSD in 1991, data could be transferred over the 2G cell phone network at a data transmission rate of around 9600 bits/second (9.6kbps). This might seem like a tiny speck as compared to the dozens of megabytes that your phone guzzles per second today when you stream a movie over 3 G or 4 G. However even at 9.6 kbps, the first circuit switched 2G networks of the early 1990s had taken a giant step towards using the same wireless channel for both voice and data traffic – an important evolutionary step.
During the 1990s, the miniscule data rate of CSD was quickly enhanced via the development of several efficient data transfer protocols on the base GSM network. For e.g. the High Speed Circuit Switched Data (HSCSD) protocol boosted data transfer rates to 57 kbps.
By the year 2000, the introduction of the General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) protocol for wireless data transmission further boosted mobile data rates to a theoretical 114 kbps. By 2003, cell phone carriers had begun offering mobile data services based on the EDGE (Enhanced Data rates for GSM Evolution) protocol which increased data rates to as high as two to four times that of what could be achieved via GPRS i.e. in the range 236-474 kbps.
It’s interesting to note that the 3rd generation mobile telephony standards (known as 3G
for short) recommend a minimum data transfer speed of just 200 kbps! This effectively makes EDGE the first 3G complaint mobile data transfer standard. However, in practice EDGE is rarely considered a 3G standard. 3G data speeds quickly evolved to enormously higher rates than what EDGE can support via a string of 3G complaint standards such as UMTS (Universal Mobile Telecommunications System) from the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) and the competing CDMA2000 EV-DO standard from the US based TIA (Telecommunications Industry Association.
websites. The latency you would experience (and expect) while browsing from your cell phone used to be quite high. It was essentially a best effort service. The introduction of the EDGE (Enhanced Data rates for GSM Evolution) protocol in 2003 as a successor to GPRS, pushed data rates in the neighborhood of 250 kbps. With it the prospect of multimedia data file transfers, sharing of photos straight from the phone, downloading of audio files into the cell phone for playback, and sharing of small videos became a reality. However, applications that let you effortlessly stream music and movies from the internet was still outside the realm of practical possibility. The ability to do a video conference straight from your cell phone needed to wait a little while longer for the introduction of third generation data services such as UMTS and HSPA.
The 3rd Generation
The GPRS and EDGE protocols are often called 2.5G and 2.75G respectively as they go way beyond the circuit switched data (CSD) based data transfer specifications contained within the original GSM 2G standard.
The culmination of this evolution of faster and faster data speeds from Circuit Switched Data (CSD) to High Speed CSD (HSCSD) to General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) and to Evolved Data Rates for GSM Evolution (EDGE), was UMTS (Universal Mobile Telecommunications System). UMTS is a 3G cellular telephony system based on the GSM standard and is promulgated by the 3GPP (3rd Generation Partnership Project) of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU). UMTS is part of ITU’s IMT-2000 set of standards for global cellular communications based on GSM.
UMTS is not officially part of the original GSM standard although it’s often called a third generation GSM service. 3G GSM as UMTS is called, is actually a Wideband CDMA (WCDMA) based technology. Interestingly, in its original incarnation (UMTS release ’99), 3G UMTS operating over a GSM network can support downlink data rates of 384 kbps which is just an incremental improvement over EDGE’s 250 or so kbps baseline.
In 2001, NTT DoCoMo of Japan launched the world’s first 3G service based on WCDMA technology.
Packet Access (HSPA). HSPA consists of HSDPA (High Speed Downlink Packet Access) and HSUPA (High Speed Uplink Packet Access) protocols. These enhancements when made to the 3G GSM network will increase the data transfer speeds to a theoretical maximum rate of a scorching 14 Mbps. The practically seen mobile data transfer speeds are 7-10 Mbps – still nothing to sneeze at.
HSPA and its further evolution HSPA+ are sometimes called 3.5G, 3.75G or 3.9G technologies since the speed boost that they provide pushes the data transfer rate of the 3G network by as much as a factor of 30.
IS-95/cdmaOne
Figure 30: Worldwide growth of GSM and CDMA phone subscriptions from 1995 to 2013.
While the GSM based voice and mobile data revolution was underway in Europe and Japan during the 1990s, the USA saw the emergence of a new 2G standard called IS-95 a.k.a. cdmaOne. cdmaOne was born out of work done by the Qualcomm company during the 1980s. It became the dominant competing technology to the Digital-AMPS digital cellular system in operation within the United States during the early portion of the 1990s.
The GPRS (2.5G), EDGE(2.75G) and UMTS (3G) and HSPA (3.5G) protocols enabled progressively faster data transmission speeds over the base GSM protocol. Similarly cdmaOne evolved via the introduction of the CDMA2000 family of 3G standards, rather cryptically called 1xRTT, 1xEVDO and 1X-Advanced. These cdmaOne based protocols also provided progressively faster data transmission speeds over the base cdmaOne protocol. The evolution of cdmaOne went almost in lock step with that of GSM. However, the reach of cdmaOne remained stunted to the singularly vast North American mobile phone market, along with a few other pockets around the world such as South Korea. Interestingly, even in the North American market, GSM appears to have made strong in-roads. AT & T and T-Mobile’s vast networks have embraced GSM instead of remaining wedded to CDMA2000.
Even though GSM has turned out to be the clearly dominant standard the world over, the remaining CDMA based cellular network operators have been dragging their feet on converting their networks to GSM and UMTS.
There is a very simple reason for this reluctance – the advent of 4G.
Fourth generation cellular networks
4G cellular systems are a significantly evolved version of 3G to the point where there is basically no backward compatibility with 3G.
The reason for this is that the 4G standard does not support circuit-switched based telephony at all and thereby completely departs from the technology that has been the mainstay of mobile telephone networks since their inception in the 1940s!
Instead, fourth generation cellular systems are based on an all-IP (Internet Protocol) network. In that respect they resemble the working mechanics of the internet more than any kind of voice based telephone system.
However there are three mobile systems called LTE, WiMAX and HSPA+ (an evolution of the HSPA standard) which come closest to meeting these requirements. When your phone carrier says that they offer a 4G service, at least in some cases what they might be claiming is adherence to one of these three sub-4G standards.
LTE (Long Term Evolution) was first proposed by NTT Docomo of Japan in 2004. Voice and data traffic on an LTE based wireless network is packetized into-Internet Protocol (IP) packets. For data, LTE supports a maximum download speed of 300 Mbps and an upload speed of 75 Mbps.
WiMAX (Worldwide Interoperability for Wireless Access) is a wireless communication standard sponsored by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). WiMAX belongs to the general family of IEEE 802.xx standards. The most well known member of this family is the 802.11 WiFi standard that your computer and your WiFi access point use to talk to each other. WiMAX offers data transfer speeds of up to 30-70 Mbps in both directions. City wide deployments of WiMAX have reported much lower speeds in the neighborhood of 1-10 Mbps.
HSPA+ is an evolved version of HSPA (High Speed Packet Access) and provides download speeds of up to 168 Mbps and upload speeds of up to 22 Mbps.
Revised versions of LTE called LTE-Advanced and of WiMAX called WiMAX Release 2 were released in 2011 and these newer versions do conform to ITU-R’s speed rules for 4G systems. Since LTE, WiMAX and HSPA by themselves don’t meet 4G data speed requirements, they can at best be called as 3.75G to 3.9G systems, as per the naming methodology mentioned earlier,
Once again the Nordic countries have been at the forefront of 4G wireless rollouts. The first LTE based 4G rollout was made by TeliaSonera in Stockholm and in Oslo on December 14, 2009. During the following two years Verizon Wireless performed the United States’ first large scale LTE rollout. Meanwhile South Korea launched a WiMAX network in 2006.
THE BIRTH OF THE SMART PHONE
Up through 1990 mobile phone makers struggled to contain the size, weight and power consumption of phones. So big were these problems that they took up all the attention, energy and design skill of cell phone engineers. They had little interest in pondering over the possibility of the mobile phone being used for anything other than voice calling and the occasional SMS.
This was to soon change.
The IBM Simon
Figure 31: The IBM Simon
The 1980s had opened with a delightful surprise in the form of the unveiling by Motorola of the DynaTAC cell phone. Even at 1.75 pounds, this was the world’s first truly handheld mobile phone.
10 years later, in 1992 the world would be offered another treat in the form of the IBM Simon Personal Communicator touch screen phone.
Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) devices were already known to people in the 1980s in the form of the Psion series which debuted in mid-1980s and perhaps more famously in the form of the Apple Newton which debuted in 1992.
The IBM Simon did not stop there in its ability to be the harbinger of modern smart phone features. The Simon ran on a modified version of the IBM DOS operating system and you could actually install new programs on the device! This singular feature, the hallmark of all modern smart phones would not come into mainstream use for another 15 years when the Mobile App Store was introduced by Apple in 2008.
The Simon ran on a 16 MHz x86 CPU, had 1 MB of RAM, one 1 MB of user storage and came with a 2400 bps modem.
IBM manufactured the phone under contract with Mitsubishi Electric and sold it on Bell South’s 1G AMPS cellular network. Needless to say you couldn’t browse the internet from Simon, although you could send and receive emails, faxes and text messages.
Simon debuted at COMDEX in 1992, was available for purchase by 1994 and was pulled off the market by 1995. In its short life Simon offered a magnificent lens into the smart phone’s future in a way that few consumer devices have since accomplished.
The early business phones
Figure 32: The Nokia 9000 Communicator
The Nokia 9000 launched in 1996 and sported a 24 MHz processor from Intel (the i386), 8 MB RAM and the GEOS Operating System. It weighed almost 400 grams – much too heavy as compared to cell phones around that time.
The 9000 let you do everything that the IBM Simon did plus browse the web over a slow CSD (Circuit Switched Data) based 2G data link.
In 1998-99 the Nokia 9000 was succeeded by the Nokia 9110 which sported a faster 33 MHz i486 processor and otherwise was basically the same as the 9000. The 9110 did come in quite a bit lighter on the scale at just over 250 grams.
Figure 33: Nokia 9210 (back right), 9300 (front center) and 9500 (back left)
Between 2000 to 2002 Nokia continued the evolution of the 9000 series with the launch of the 9210 and 9210i. The 9210 came with a 32 bit ARM9 processor clocked at 52 MHz, 16 MB RAM and the Symbian Operating System. 9210i boosted the memory to 40 MB, added support for Flash and had in-built support for media streaming. By 2002, people were using their cell phones to browse the internet and stream small video and audio files over the 2.xG based GPRS and EDGE networks. 3G networks were also beginning to come online making much faster browsing and media streaming possible. In that sense Nokia had launched the 9000 series at just the right time.
In 2004 Nokia released the last of the path breaking 9000 series phones with the launch of the 9500. The 9500 sported 80 MB of internal memory (a prodigious amount for a phone at that time), and a 150 MHz Texas Instruments ARM9 processor (once again a scorching fast beast for its era).
(albeit VGA – 640 x 480 pixels), GPRS and EDGE based internet connectivity, SMS, MMS, Email, FAX, support for Java Micro Edition (J2ME) based mobile apps, a music player that supported MP3 and MP4 (AAC) files and a Microsoft and PDF document viewer.
The Nokia 9500 phone was quite a feature packed package and a marvel of modern engineering.
The term “smart phone” is said to have been first publicly coined by Ericsson in 1997 when it showcased a device that looked quite a bit like the Nokia 9000 communicator. Ericsson’s phone was called the “Smart Phone GS 88”.
Figure 34: The Ericsson GS 88 ‘Smart Phone’ ('Penelope')
Iconic mobile phones of the 1990s
Apart of the IBM Simon and the Nokia Communicator series, the 1990s saw the introduction of several other iconic cell phone models.
The Nokia 2110 was released in 1994 which featured the Nokia call tune for the first time, a tune taken out of a musical composition called “Gran Vals” by the Spanish classical guitarist and composer Francisco Tárrega.
Figure 35: The ‘Gran Vals’ music score
Figure 36: Motorola StarTAC 3000
The Motorola StarTAC was released in 1996. The StarTAC further revolutionized cell phone design with its clam shell operation.
Figure 37: The Nokia 5110
Figure 38: The DoCoMo D502i
NTT DoCoMo launched the D502i in Japan in 1999. The D502i sported a vibrant color screen that is somewhat akin to the ones seen in today’s smart phones.
In 1999, Nokia released the Nokia 7110 which looked like any other Nokia phone with a tiny black and white screen around that time. However 7110 was Nokia’s first attempt at putting a full GPRS based internet WAP browser in a low cost, consumer grade, candy bar shaped, keypad based cell phone.
The GSM factor
The 1990s continued to witness the unmistakable footprint of Motorola’s innovation engine in the global cell phone business. During this time the world also witnessed the meteoric rise of another player – Nokia. With its unmatched ability to introduce high quality mobile phones in every single market segment from low end consumer to the high end business in every mobile phone market in the world, Nokia began to capture market share at a phenomenal rate.
Nokia’s quick embrace of the digital 2G GSM standard in its phones also had a lot to do with its rise as the number one cell phone maker in the 1990s. Nokia could make each phone that it manufactured instantly available in dozens of countries and among millions of people in the burgeoning worldwide GSM market, including in North America which was Motorola’s backyard.
unfortunate consequences for Motorola. The analog cellular standards weren’t as standardized as GSM was in their use of frequencies. Therefore, Motorola had to introduce country specific versions of each analog phone model it would manufacture, thereby severely reducing the rate at which it could introduce its products into the world’s markets. Secondly and most importantly, it simply couldn’t capitalize on the rapid spread of GSM outside North America. By mid 1990s, Motorola introduced GSM versions of some of its iconic phone models such as the MicroTAC. The MicroTAC was a far superior phone in design and appeal than the Nokia phones available around that time. However by that time, the phone market outside of North America was already tightly captured by Nokia and what little space existed was being captured by innovative European and Japanese players such as Ericsson, Siemens, Kyocera and NEC.
It wasn’t until a decade later that Motorola would once again regain a firm foot hold in the modern cell phone market.
The final march towards the smart phone
Figure 39: A comparative illustration of battery characteristics. High energy density batteries such as Li-ion and Li-polymer have revolutLi-ionized cellular phone size and phone design by packing in a lot more
charge per gram of battery weight.
While Li-ion considerably reduced battery size, cost and overall weight of the device, progressive miniaturization and advancement of semiconductor components such as transistors further reduced the size, weight and power consumption. With the problems of size, weight and battery life that had plagued cellular phones up into the 1980s finally under control, cell phone manufacturers found themselves focusing more on introducing non-telephonic features into the mobile devices. Features such as text messaging (SMS), editing of documents and spreadsheets, calendar, clock, simple games, audio/video players, multi-color displays, personalization of the user interface and probably the most important feature: access to email and internet browsing were becoming mainstream in even the mid-priced phone models.
Especially during the second half of 1990s people got used to using their cell phones for doing things other than making and receiving calls. The advent of GPRS, EDGE and then 3G based mobile data networks during the late 1990s and early 2000s ensured that people used their phones as much as a way to get on the internet as a telephonic device. Meanwhile iconic devices such as the Nokia 9000 Communicator Series kept the dream of the mobile office alive and growing.
This trend to add more and more features into the cell phone continued into the early years of the 21st century.
The first decade of the new millennium began with the introduction of several iconic phones.
In 2000, the Sharp J-SH04 was released in Japan as the world’s first phone with a fully integrated camera. It was effectively the world’s first commercially sold camera phone. Its 110,000 pixel CMOS sensor was a far cry from today’s 10 million to 40 million pixel smart phone cameras. Nevertheless it was the first phone in which you could snap a picture and share it via email directly from your cell phone.
Figure 41: The Ericsson R380
Also in 2000, Ericsson came out with the R380 which was touted as a touch screen smart phone although no mobile apps could be installed on it. After a gap of several years, the touch screen was re-introduced into the cell phone with R380.
Figure 42: The Samsung SPH-M100
2001 saw the launch of the world’s first 3G network in Japan and with it the world’s first 3G phone, the Matsushita P2101V went on sale in Japan.
Figure 43: The Nokia 1100
2003 saw the introduction of the Nokia 1100, a small, basic, cheap and incredibly rugged GSM phone that Nokia sold across the world. Since its launch in 2003 the Nokia sold a staggering 250 million of these devices, making the 1100 one of the best selling consumer electronics devices of all times.
Figure 44: The Moto Razr
Figure 45: The Moto ROKR connected to an Apple Powerbook
Unfortunately for Motorola and also the history of industrial design, in 2005 Motorola introduced the design anti-thesis of the Moto-Razr when it launched the Moto-ROKR. The ROKR was the first phone with Apple iTunes integrated into the phones.
The Moto-ROKR was a flop.
The story goes that Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs was horrified to see the ROKR’s design and especially the fact that something so clunky would come to incorporate the Apple iTunes brand within it. He resolved that Apple would itself produce the iPod Phone that people had expected ROKR to be.
Truth be told, as early as the year 2000, Steve Jobs had already begun toying with the concept of using a pure glass surface on a tablet device for typing and viewing content. When Apple’s design engineers came back to him a few weeks later with a prototype that demonstrated a touch screen based user interface with an on-screen keyboard and inertial scrolling, it blew Jobs’ mind completely off of the tablet idea. The sheer beauty of the user interface that he witnessed in front of him convinced him that he needed to forget about the tablet and focus on creating a pure touch screen phone first.
Thus was born the seed of the iPhone.
In fact the technologies that went into the user interface of the iPhone had already existed. Many of the features of the iPhone such as a touch screen, inertial scrolling, multi-touch gestures, swipe to unlock, skeumorphic design i.e. making a software artifact on the screen such a button look exactly like a real physical button, were already cooking in various labs around the world or had already been introduced individually in a commercial form in other cell phone products, including in Apple’s own Macintosh product line.
The iPhone’s genius was in bringing together all these next generation user interface design concepts into one seamlessly fluid and ultra-user friendly design.
Figure 47: The skeumorphic design of one of the screens in the Apple Garage Band App
Figure 48: Skeumorphic (left) versus flat (right) icon designs on the iPhone home screen. Apple, under Steve Jobs had embraced skeumorphism as the dominant design style in all Apple products including the
Apple Macintosh. After Job’s death in 2011, Apple moved away from this design theme. iOS7 released in 2013 was the first version of iOS that abandoned skeumorphic design and adopted the flat iconography
Figure 49: The original iPhone 2G released in 2007 (Left), and iPhone 6 released by Apple in 2014 (Right).
2005 also saw the introduction of the stylish Sony Ericsson W600i, the first phone with the legendary Sony Walkman built in. Sony phones still enjoy a loyal following among users who value the high quality sound produced by these devices.
Figure 50: Sony Ericsson W600i
The years running up to the launch of the iPhone in 2007 saw the near simultaneous rise of four PDA-Phone style smart phone platforms – Blackberry, Handspring, Palm and Windows CE.
Figure 51: The Handspring Visor Deluxe, black (Left) and an early model Palm Pilot (Right).
